by Chris Clancy, Hamilton
Letters to local newspaper editorial pages have offered various opinions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. A couple of the more common issues have been the effectiveness and safety of masking and vaccines. I am comfortable that the CDC website and others such as Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic websites offer valid information. However, some folks are not and suggest we do our own research and discover the facts for ourselves. I am in favor of this concept, with one caveat. I suggest we use sources that are factual, balanced, and based on proper scientific methods.
I have seen suggestions to use your judgment as to where to find the information, or to watch certain videos and read certain websites. The place to find the best scientifically valid information is from peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. Peer-reviewed papers are written by professional researchers in the appropriate fields and verified by other experts who have evaluated the methods and conclusions. Review papers – papers that summarize many papers – are particularly useful.
It sounds a little daunting, and it is more work than watching videos, but the basic facts are not too far out of reach for most of us. Good sites to find summaries of peer-reviewed scientific findings are Google Scholar and PubMed.. To see a list of peer-reviewed articles, search subjects such as COVID-19 and face masks, vaccines and COVID-19, etc. Look at several papers and don’t just pick the ones that support your opinions. For me, trained in biology but not in medical fields, the terminology in the papers can be confusing, but I can usually understand the general findings by reading the abstract and conclusions. Occasionally, even the abstract is hard to understand. In that case, I move on to another paper. A website that may be more user-friendly is Science Daily. Sometimes, the first few articles listed are not peer reviewed, but then peer-reviewed articles are listed. Conveniently, this site has an easy-to-read article for each paper, with quotes from authors.
Scientists have the same strengths and weaknesses as everyone else, but they are trained skeptics. When reviewing another scientist’s work, they are asking themselves, “Could this author be wrong, and why? Where might mistakes have been made?” That is the nature of scientific review. My experience is that it can be a humbling process for the author. The peer-review process is not perfect and occasionally a poor paper is published, but overall, the papers are good scientific material.
We can use the Internet to learn relatively simple things. But, when we have complicated issues with our car, computer, health care or other matters, we seek help from the appropriate specialist. We may have learned enough to ask good questions, but we depend on the training and experience of qualified people to determine what needs to be done.